[78-L] Martin Williams (was: Blistering exchange between Leonard Feather and Chris Albertson

[Jeff Sultanof]

Thank you for sharing these. I was off this list for awhile and haven't
heard these before.

When I was editorial director at WB Publishing, I worked with Artis on two
book projects. Her work was beyond meticulous, and I can well believe that
she was mortified when told about the edits. She was a wonderful pianist who
used to laugh out loud when she played some of Gershwin's trickier passages.
Wonderful memories.

I also remember well the issues with the Gershwin broadcasts. At the time, I
was preparing Gershwin Facsimile Editions of four of his orchestral works,
and I was going through all sorts of nonsense with the representatives of
the estate. They were freaking out about the fact that in 1988, Gershwin
would become public domain in several European countries, and the thought of
all that money being lost was driving some of the descendants crazy. The
subject of the broadcasts came up in the office, and of course no one had
heard them but me.

Jeff Sultanof

On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 2:01 PM, Michael Biel <mbiel at mbiel.com> wrote:

> From: Jeff Sultanof <jeffsultanof at gmail.com>
> > Dr. Biel,
> > Would you please share a couple of Martin Williams stories?
> > I had a brief encounter with him at an International Association
> > of Jazz Educators convention back in the eighties when it was in
> > D.C. and whatever respect for him that I'd had went out the window.
>
> I've told these stories before and I hope repeating these gems does not
> bore the group!
>
> In 1984 I was program chair for the ARSC Conference at Bowling Green
> (Ohio) State U, and on the final day Martin was giving a talk.  Over the
> years I had seen many presenters (including myself) given the hook and
> forced to end early, followed by a talk which ran under-time or
> something similar.  I vowed when I was in charge to be lenient with time
> and I quickly discovered that it all evened out in the end, and it
> allowed for a more pleasant and informative experience for presenter and
> audience.  But I just HAD to go photocopy some things including the
> attendee list for distribution, and Bill Schurk would have to take me
> way across campus to do it.  So I left the conference in the hands of
> the previous program chair, Charlie Simpson.  Now Charlie was a stickler
> for time, and many of us had been given the hook by him.  I thought he
> had seen the error of his ways by watching how I handled things, but he
> apparently reverted to form and yanked Martin off the stage just as he
> was about to do the climatic last five minutes of a precisely planned
> presentation.  I returned  a few minutes later, and found Martin and
> Charlie literally in a wrestling match/fist fight in the lobby of the
> Holiday Inn where the conference was being held!  I actually had to
> break up the fight!  In this case it turns out that Martin was right,
> because some of the following things ran undertime, but he didn't have
> to beat up on poor Charlie!
>
> During his final years Martin became a devoted cheerleader for Sarah
> Vaughn.  I don't know if it extended into the physical like the
> relationship between Lenny Kunstadt and Victoria Spivy had apparently
> been, but he was DEVOTED.  His final ARSC presentation was an overly
> gushing tribute to her, and in the Q&A I think I might have discussed
> her inappropriately jazzy performance as Bloody Mary in the absolutely
> disgustingly dreadful recording of South Pacific staring tenor Jose
> Carreras in a role written for a basso, and Kiri Te Kanawa who couldn't
> have convinced a deaf person that she was from Little Rock, Arkansas.
> The worst miscasting job ever foisted on the world, with the exception
> of their prior year's recording of West Side Story which had Kiri from
> Australia trying to sound Porto Rican and Spanish Jose trying to sound
> non-Porto Rican.  Well, in the video of the South Pacific recording
> session, Sarah V concludes her totally non-Tonganese native rendition of
> Bali Hai with a statement "That ought to show them that I am more than a
> jazz singer."  No, Sarah, that showed them that you are ONLY a jazz
> singer who can not shake the urge to sing a song in YOUR character
> instead of doing the REQUIRED job of singing the song in HER character.
> It would be fine for an album "Sarah Vaughn Sings Her Versions of Rogers
> and Hammerstein" but not for a recording of the songs as sung by the
> characters in the show.  In my explanation that she could sing jazz but
> not serious music, Martin GLARED down at me -- he was on a stage and I
> was in the front row videotaping -- and SNEARED "So you think that jazz
> is not serious music?"  In this context, no it is not.  Jazz is a
> performers music.  Classical music and broadway show music like R&H is a
> composer's music.  You perform it as it is written, not how you feel and
> re-write it.  They are two entirely different things, and Sarah Vaughn
> had proved that she could not cross the bridge from one to the other
> even thought she thought she had.  I thought he was going to leap off
> the stage and have a go at me like he had at poor Charlie a few years
> earlier, but someone dragged him off the stage in the opposite direction
> because his time had ended!
>
> My last story involves two consecutive ARSC conferences.  When Martin
> did his series of re-creations of Smithsonian original cast albums of
> shows which preceded the concept of original cast albums, some of them
> were very controversial.  He edited out some performers from records if,
> for example, the band had performed in the show but the vocalist had
> not.  He gave a presentation about the series and defended that
> practice, and additionally said that these albums were worthy of
> musicologist study because in many cases the original scores had been
> lost and some of these recordings were the only way the scores might be
> able to be re-created.  (This was years before many of those lost scores
> were discovered in a Seacaus New Jersey warehouse.)  He also discussed
> how he had Jack Tower do some "creative editing" to fix some skips in
> George Gershwin's piano performance of "Someone To Watch Over Me."  The
> recording was from one of the Feenamint programs "Music By Gershwin"
> that the Gershwin family had allowed George Garabedian release on Mark
> 56 records, and then donated the originals to the Library of Congress
> where I had examined them.  I knew there were two sets of lacquer dubs
> from the lost celluloid floppies (except for side one where one copy had
> been waterdamaged and peeled.)  In the case of Someone, Garabedian had
> used the discs that missed a couple of notes in the transition from side
> two to three, and where there was an uncorrected skip about ten seconds
> into side three.  Martin had Jack repeat a whole section without skips
> in place of the part that had skips.  In the Q&A I asked if he explained
> this in the notes because perhaps some musicologist might use this
> recording to re-create and analyze Gershwin's improvisational playing
> style.  He said that it mentioned in the notes that Jack Tower had done
> some "creative editing".  I slammed him for not being detailed enough,
> pirating the recording without permission off of Garabedian's album (I
> had asked George if Martin had asked) instead of going down the mall to
> LC and using the original discs which probably could be dubbed properly
> without the skips.
>
> Well, the very next year it happened!  A very young Artis Woodehouse did
> a presentation at the first ARSC in Nashville, and ARSC had gone all out
> and rented a grand piano for her.  I had intended to write to her when I
> saw that her topic was an analysis of Gershwin's improvisational piano
> style, but unfortunately didn't have a chance.  She started by saying
> she was going to present analysis of three pieces using the printed
> scores, the printed improvisations, and recordings.  I said a silent
> prayer that she was NOT going to use Someone To Watch Over Me.  And then
> 2/3s of the way thru a brilliant presentation, she said, "Lastly I am
> going to discuss 'Someone To Watch Over Me.'"   I whispered "Oh No!" to
> Fred Williams who was sitting next to me.  And over in the back of the
> auditorium I saw Martin Williams slump lower and lower into his seat.
> She had written out the notation of the creatively edited recording and
> played it note for note, including the place where the editing had
> Gershwin repeating a measure exactly the same way twice.  There were two
> mics set up for questions, and to my surprise Martin got up to one near
> him, so I figured I would let him do his confession.  He asked the
> question that he OBVIOUSLY already knew.   "Did you use the Mark 56 or
> the Smithsonian version of Someone?"  "I'm not sure," she replied,
> "because I borrowed the record without the jacket."  "I think you might
> have used the Smithsonian.  Did you know that there was some editing on
> it?"  She turned pale.  "No," she weakly replied.
>
> At this point I stepped up to the other Q&A mic.  "Martin, last year I
> told you that your editing would get you in trouble, and now the
> chickens have come home to roost.  You had bragged about how
> musicologists could use these recordings to re-create lost scores.  Miss
> Wodehouse, this is not your fault.  Even if you had the liner notes you
> could not have known what had been done with this recording because
> details had not been given. Martin, you should have not used
> Garabedian's recording without permission and you should have gone down
> the mall to LC to use the original."  I then explained the side change
> and skip had been covered over by a ten second repeat.  I had compared
> both recordings and was able to detect where the splices had happened
> and could undo what Jack Tower had done.  She was devastated, and I told
> her it was not her fault, it was Martin's, but it proves how important
> using ORIGINALS can be.  (This is especially important in film studies
> -- remember the problems with the DVD of The Jazz Singer that I could
> analyize by comparing it with other earlier prints -- and other things
> like literary and paintings, etc.)
>
> About ten years later a new AUTHORIZED release of the Gershwin
> recordings came out, and this time the producers went back and had the
> Library of Congress dub off both sets of the lacquer dubs, and this time
> Jack Towers was able to find the missing notes and put the program
> together without covering up with repeats.  I phoned Jack to ask him
> about it, and it turns out that he had completely forgotten about doing
> the creative editing for Martin Williams!!  And a year or two later
> Artis did an article on Gershwin for Keyboard magazine and once again
> did a printed score of the Someone improvisations from the Feenamint
> program.  When I saw her a few months later I congratulated her on the
> article and reminded her that I was the one who explained about the
> editing.  "I used the correct version this time, didn't I?" she
> anxiously asked.  "Yes" I replied as she heaved a sigh of relief.
>
> Mike Biel   mbiel at mbiel.com
>
>
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